We all need to continue to work together to strengthen the European and World Movement Against the CRISES of Austerity and Neo-Liberalism.

At the Syriza Victory Rally in London on 28 Janary 2015 at the TUC Congress House, a representative of the new Syriza government warned that much pressure will be placed upon the new anti-Austerity government in Greece and that the best way for us to support their revolution is to mobilise strong anti-austerity movements in our own countries.

We must do everything we can to continue to energise the already existing Anti-Austerity movement, and now with the inclusion in the debates and a viable chance of political expression and representation, work to hold the ‘balance of power’ in a hung parliament. A strong movement and humane government here will benefit the peoples of the the United Kingdom, Europe and the rest of the world – and will prevent another Allende unfolding for the first Left government in European history.

The Politics of the Imperfect

On Global Politics: Building a Different World

Concrete Needs, Concrete Situations and Concrete Actions

James Luchte

The Global Context and Poly-Centric Perspectives – Taking Sides

I am speaking of global governance as a complex organisation which cannot be merely wished away. Getting from A to Z when you are at H requires that one go to I, J, and K, before X, Y, and Z. There have been movements to build a world government before, but that cannot even be an issue until America is reigned in – we are at a more preliminary phase of history, where even a weak institutional world federation would be a mammoth step forward in a world which cannot even have an effective United Nations. If we jump too far ahead in our thinking, we will become merely talkers and not actors of real history. We need to deal with the concrete and specific conditions of the world as it is evolving now.

Every single person upon this earth has a story to tell and a life to live.

Every single person is also radically finite, mortal, thrown upon the topography of the earth, and inhabiting an ultimately makeshift world.

Each in his or her way is also ‘eternal’ not only with respect to having been there, as a fact, or phenomenon, but also as a free and creative being engaged in his or her situation.

No one, no word, act or omission, no silence is every truly forgotten.

One tries to listen to all the stories, all the voices from across the world, but each is limited – there is only so much each of us can experience or know. One sifts through the material and makes a rough sketch of the evolving state of the planet.

Beyond the facticity of cosmopolitan life, each also seeks to speak with others, make connections, and create relations that transgress our own routine limited perspectives. Such relations are finite as each is finite, but this transgression of accomplices will have its ‘eternal’ impact in collective action.

It is upon this expanded topography that one begins to express strong instincts and suspicions in the context of a ‘we’, a relation. Experience and knowledge, experiencing and knowing, are collective as well as individual endeavours.

At the same time, however, life is not merely about ‘experience’ and ‘knowledge’, as it would be if one were merely a tourist of life, but life is primarily lived, and lived in very similar and basic manner by everyone – but in widely divergent avenues in terms of the quality of life. In this light, life is therefore about struggle, action, imagination, creativity, disappointment, patience, joy, sorrow, love and hate.

The tragic drama of life takes place upon a common earth, yet this place where we inexplicably live, ‘our world’, remains divided on so many grounds into an indefinite typology of territories, relations of subordination, servitude, hunger, violence, intimidation and outright murder or forced starvation.

Capital plays itself out as the global ‘gangster’ on this theatrical stage of a permanently militaristic political economy, democracy as McDonald’s-ization, franchises of KFC, Burger King, human trafficking – corruption, theft and chaos. Stock brokers snort cocaine off the bellies of corporate sponsored escorts while millions die of starvation, lack of access to clean water, to medicine, where the very principles of capital forbid the fulfilment of basic so-called ‘human rights’ (a thoroughly politicised and over-determined notion, rendered nearly meaningless via political and legal nihilism), and under the cynical cloak of ‘intellectual property,’ litigiously prevents the production (and distribution) of more affordable generic versions of food or drugs for the sake the poor.